Learn From It

So. Intelligent Design. I wonder if its proponents are starting to wish that their grand plan to redefine science wasn't also the work of at least one Intelligent Designer.

There's an irony to the pomposity and pride that accompanied the Christian/Fundamentalist push to corrupt Science in order to serve themselves. Last time I checked, Humility was a big deal with the Christians. That's not ironic, tho, that's just hypocritical. What's ironic is that Humility has a profound role in the scientific approach to discovery, and that it was Science's absence of ego that thwarted the Christian attempt at corrupting it.

I'm not saying that every scientist is humble; far from it. What this is about, in fact, is that there is no hubris behind something arrived at by proper scientific method. Assertions generally require believability; and believing generally requires a strong persona (human or mythic) in which the masses can have faith. Science uses assertions, of course, but only tentatively or temporarily, meaning that there's a willingness to drop an assertion when it's demostrated to be untrue or impossible, or to drop an assertion when the truth of it changes.

Christian “truth” mongers abound, hiking up and down Main Street America with their big sacs of capital-T's, asserting various truths to be Truths, immediately ossifying each into Timelessness (see? those capital-T's come in handy!). Trouble is, many truths don't become Timeless Truths, they just become Dated.

I can assert here that this is a plausible mechanism by which every myth moves into History: it becomes incompatible with the Present because it refuses to adapt to the times.

The Discovery Institute—which seems hell bent on doing everything to prevent actual discovery of anything, calls the recent Dover ruling a “triumph”, stating: “Anyone who thinks a court ruling is going to kill off interest in intelligent design is living in another world...”

Remember, folks, these are the same types of people who brought you the Scopes Monkey Trial, who saw fit to find John Scopes “guilty” of teaching evolution. Again. Not irony. Hypocrisy.

Fact of the matter is, the rest of us are living in another world, the world of material explanations which humbly acknowledge the limits and limitations of learning and set to painstakingly carve out those niches of knowledge that are discoverable. We don't live in the world they live in, where Zeus came down from Olympia to create the world, the world where interpretation of the Christian bible contemporarily paints Jesus of Nazareth as a neocon.

These are the people who deny the mutability of truth even as they seek to change it.

Click on the document icon to download the full PDF of the Dover judge's summary of Monkey Trial II. Below is an excerpt that I find extraordinary for its directness:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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